Black lettering tattoo in Devanagari script arranged in a spiral around a central symbol, placed across a person's upper back.

Devanagari script spiral on upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A spiral of Devanagari script wraps around a central symbol on the upper back. The lines are crisp black ink with solid strokes and no shading, and the lettering is set in a continuous curve that tightens toward the centre. The skin tone is the only other colour in a close, tightly framed shot.

Lettering Geometric Back Spiral Script Om symbol

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift at Ferndale House had been broken since Tuesday, so I climbed the nineteen floors with my father's notebook under my arm, counting the landings the way he used to count tabla beats on the bus. Each landing had the same grey door and the same smell of bleach and somebody's onions.

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The notebook was the thing he never let anyone touch. Inside, on a page gone soft as cloth, he had copied a line of Devanagari in pencil, gone over it in biro, then in fountain pen once he'd been paid for the Christmas shifts. He told me it had to be written round, never straight, because the words were a wheel and a wheel that stopped was only a stone. He drew it on the backs of gas bills at the kitchen table, turning the paper a little after every letter, until the last syllable sat in the middle of the page like a seed.

On the fourteenth floor I stopped to get my breath and tried to read it the way he taught me, starting at the outside and coming in. The curl of the script pulled my eye down and round. I got as far as the first vowel mark before the landing light clicked off and left me in the dark, with a television murmuring behind somebody's door.

I didn't need the light. I knew where the middle was. I climbed the last five floors with my hand on the rail, circling the stairwell blind, and when I reached the top the roof door was propped open and the whole city lay below in the spiral of its streetlights, every road bending in towards the hospital where he had written his final line. I set the notebook on the parapet and turned it once, the way he always did.